On Wednesday, November 7,
1894, two boxes of quartz containing 10 hundredweight of gold valued at £25,000
- $US4.1 million in today’s money - were exhibited at the depot of North’s
Typewriter Manufacturing Company Limited at No 53 Queen Victoria Street, across
the road from London’s Mansion House. “Errand boy and nobleman jostled one
another to catch a glimpse of the golden stones,” said the Westminster Budget. “There has been something of a gold fever in
London … The City has been profoundly stirred, and no little excitement has
been manifested. Crowds have gazed through the windows at the specimens of
quartz which Lord Fingall brought to this country from the Londonderry mine.
The specimens are guarded by a couple of stalwart policemen.” The Budget didn’t consider it necessary to
explain to its readers where the Londonderry mine was; there’d been so much
news printed about the great West Australian gold discovery in the preceding
two months that the Budget doubtless
believed all of London already knew.
John Thomas North, an honorary colonel but never a lord.
The Londonderry mine was 10½ miles outside Coolgardie in the
Goldfields-Esperance region of Western Australia. On Monday, May 7, 1894, six
prospectors who had travelled across the vast continent - John Huxley, William
Gardner, John Mills, Thomas Elliott, Peter Carter and Henry Dawson - were
returning disconsolate and empty-handed from Widgiemooltha to Coolgardie when
Mills, the youngest in the group, literally stumbled across the Londonderry
gold reef. Mills named it after his home town in Northern Ireland. Before going
West in search of his fortune, Mills had been a boundary rider in Jerilderie in
the southern Riverina of New South Wales, a town most famous for being held up
by Ned Kelly’s bushranger gang in 1879.
The six gold finders, with Lord Fingall and Coolgardie mayor James Shaw sitting front right.
John
Mills was part of a disparate lot. Dawson was from Summer Hill, Sydney, Carter
also from Sydney, Gardner from Balmain, Sydney, and Elliott and Huxley from
Victoria. Within a few weeks of Mills’ find, and keeping their discovery a
tight secret, the six had dollied out 8000 ounces of gold, valued at £33,000.
But after the group applied for a 24-acre mining lease from Coolgardie mining
agent Walter Henry Lindsay (1869-), word of their rich lode began to seep out.
On Saturday, June 23, the group took their treasure into town, hidden under a
load of firewood, and lodged 4280 ounces of gold with the Union Bank in
Coolgardie. Three days later Elliott, an elderly quartz miner, described by his
friends as “rather infirm”, went into the town, got wildly drunk, and revealed
to all and sundry from whence the gold had come. By early July the story was
being told in newspapers across Australia, along with the location of Mills’
find.
In
May 1894 Lord Fingall left England to attend to mining business in Tasmania. On
hearing of the Londonderry find in July, he travelled on to Melbourne and
Adelaide and reached Albany in Western Australia by steamer and Perth by train.
There the colony premier Sir John Forrest introduced him to the Coolgardie
mining warden John Michael Finnerty (1853-1913), who gave Fingall a full
run-down of the Londonderry find.
John Michael Finnerty
Fingall
and Finnerty, along with West Australian Postmaster-General Captain Richard
Adolphus Sholl (1847-1919), inspected the well-secured Londonderry site. On Thursday, September 13, Fingall persuaded the
remaining members of Mills’ group to accept £296,000 for the mine (they had
already banked the £33,000 from their findings). Dawson, one of the older
members of the group, and the only experienced miner among them, had already
sold his share to Huxley and Mills for £3000, and on August 4, 1894, a friend
of Finnerty’s, Belfast-born James Shaw (1846-1910), the first Mayor of
Coolgardie, had joined the syndicate, first getting a 1/24th share for £3000,
then buying 40 shares to increase his investment to £7600. Shaw, who had served
in the Maori Wars in New Zealand, had previously been the Mayor of Adelaide and
had built the South Australian Houses of Parliament and Marble Hill, the South
Australian Governor’s summer residence.
James Shaw
On
his return to England, on November 6, Fingall entered into an agreement with
North for a shared interest in the mine, which the two planned to sell to
investors for £650,000, £417,000 in cash and £233,000 in fully-paid shares. The
remaining £50,000 of the float would go toward working capital. Fingall and
North – among many others - firmly believed Londonderry’s “Golden Hole” would
yield well in excess of £1 million, almost £131 million ($US 162 million) today.
The
best laid plans of bounders and noblemen sometimes go awry, and in the case of
the Londonderry mine the collapse of the Fingall-North scheme was utterly
spectacular. When Fingall set out from London to return to Coolgardie and
oversee mine development in February 1895, Londonderry was still being regarded
as potentially the richest gold mine in the world. Fingall’s initial reports
back to England were so encouraging as to excite North into doubling his
investment.
But
by April 1895 the full, horrible truth had started to become apparent. In
August North turned in fury on Fingall and his cousin Plunkett. Plunkett
promptly resigned, but Fingall, North and Myring promised to settle with
investors – which Fingall certainly did, at a cost of £30,000 in November 1895,
though North and Myring were less forthcoming. North had, in fact, suffered an
enormous financial loss. With his business empire starting to crumble, he died
less than six months later, in May 1896, aged just 54.
As
one historian would later out it, “The Londonderry was a freak rich patch in an
otherwise barren reef. But that was no consolation to investors who had done
their money cold in what was later labelled the Plunderderry mine.” Wide World Magazine would sum up the
situation thus: “It was found, to the utter amazement and dismay of all
concerned, that the kernel had been taken and only the worthless shell left.
People looked at each other in blank astonishment when the news was made
public. It was darkly hinted by those in authority at home [that is, Britain] that
the ‘Golden Hole’ had been tapped and its treasures spirited away. Surely, they
said, it could not be possible that the wonderfully rich mine, which had turned
out so many thousand ounces of gold from a small hole which had caused the
mining world to ring with its fame and to look forward with eager hope to the
payment of enormous dividends, could have ‘petered out!’ Alas! It was only too
true. The ‘Golden Wonder of the World’ was a wonder no longer; its matchless
riches had been exhausted, and one of the biggest mining companies had been
floated on what was little better than a burst bubble. When the exact position
of affairs became known, and the full truth realised, such a storm of
indignation, vilification and abuse was let loose upon the heads of the
vendors, promoters, mining experts and everyone connected with the flotation
as has rarely been equalled.”
The young 'Colonel' North
Collapse
of the Londonderry “Golden Hole” enterprise didn’t immediately bring an end to
North’s high-flying, big-spending life, nor did it cause the sudden closure of
his typewriter venture. But North’s Typewriter Manufacturing Co Ltd was one of
his last three major outlays, and the pain of gold mine debacle most certainly
hastened his death and the typewriter company's slow demise thereafter.
Leeds-born
North had started his illustrious business career in 1865 in Chile and later
Peru, where he was a waterworks operator, importer and ship owner. The War of
the Pacific (1879–1883) provided him with an opportunity to purchase large
numbers of bonds in the Peruvian nitrate (saltpetre) industry, which in turn
gave him a monopoly share of the lucrative Chilean nitrate industry. He also
owned several iron and coal fields along the Biobío River and a gasworks at Iquique.
North returned to Britain 1883 and set up North's Navigation Collieries in
Glamorgan in Wales, and had investments in the Anglo-Belgian India Rubber
Company, which from 1892 operated a concession in the Congo Free State.
North
died suddenly at 3.50pm on Tuesday, May 5, 1896, while eating oysters, drinking
stout and presiding over a meeting of the Buena Syndicate in his offices at 3
Gracechurch Street, London. Almost without exception, typewriter historians
have declared his death as marking the end of North’s Typewriter Manufacturing Co
Ltd. It was not, far from it. As G. Tilghman Richards pointed out in 1964, a new, improved model had emerged in 1897. Indeed, North’s typewriters continued to be made for
another 5½ years after North died, until North’s
executors decided to sell the stock, machinery, patents and goodwill on
September 2, 1901. For want of a buyer, the company was finally voluntarily
wound up on July 18, 1903, and North’s typewriters continued to be sold until
then, more than seven years after North's death.
Lord North, a completely different man from 'Colonel' North.
Even
the man who gave the typewriter its name has been seriously misidentified by
historians. Only three typewriter history books have him correctly as ‘Colonel’
North: Friedrich Müller (1900), George Carl Mares (1909) and Paul Robert and
Peter Weil (2016). Astonishingly, ‘Colonel’ North’s own biographer, the
generally meticulous and thorough William Edmundson, trenchantly declared in
2011 that while “The Nitrate King”, may
have had shares in the typewriter company, it was named for Brighton-born
William Henry John Lord, the 11th Lord North, who died, aged 95, in 1932, 36
years after the ‘Colonel’. This mistake was first made by Typewriter Topics in 1923, although Topics managed to get “a wealthy member of England’s nobility”
mixed up with someone who had “enormous South American holdings” (that is,
‘Colonel’ North). Ernst Martin (1949), G. Tilghman Richards of London’s Science
Museum (who should have known a lot better) (1964), Darryl Rehr (1997), Michael
Adler (1973 and 1997) and Thomas
Russo (2002) all made the same error of naming the North’s typewriter owner
“Lord North”, both Adler and Russo saying Lord North died in 1896, when in fact
he was still very much alive and kicking.
Although
‘Colonel’ North bought the English Typewriter Limited’s plant at 57 Hatton
Garden, Holborn, when that company folded in April 1892, and the North’s
Typewriter Manufacturing Co Ltd was established later that same year, the
North’s typewriter did not rise from the English’s warm ashes. Morgan Donne,
who supervised production of the English, was also plant manager for North’s,
and there any connection between the two machines ended. George Beverley Cooper
(1857-1918), who assisted Donne in developing the North’s, was not involved in
the English enterprise. The patents for the North’s were in Donne’s name alone,
and were first obtained in England in 1891-92, just as the English was at its
short-lived height.
Watchmaker and motor-racing driver Morgan Donne
Morgan
Donne was born in Paris on September 9, 1860, when his father Lewis (1838-1918) was involved in
the watchmaking business there. (Donne died at Streatham, London, on November
25, 1935, aged 75.)
The
English Typewriter Limited had its offices at 6 Birchin Lane, Cornhill, London,
which was primarily the headquarters of the watch and jewellery manufacturing
business Donne & Son, then run by Morgan Donne and his father, Lewis Donne.
Donne & Son had actually been established by Morgan Donne’s
great-great-grandfather Robert Donne in 1764, so it had been around for 126
years by the time the English typewriter started its 23-month life. Indeed, in
1893, a year after the English disappeared, Donne & Son had a eight-day
clock made by Robert in 1764 which was still
working!
The
North’s company began to rail material from steel city Sheffield and industrial
centre Birmingham to London in 1893, and the North’s typewriter first reached
the market in April 1894. At that time the company was at pains to point out it
was not made in the US, and that its sale in the US was prevented by a 45 per
cent duty tax. In October the North’s won a diploma and medal of honour at the
Exposition Internationale d'Anvers, the Antwerp World’s Fair.
This is the original version of the illustration of the North's typewriter being demonstrated at the Antwerp World's Fair, the Exposition Internationale d'Anvers, between May 5-November 5, 1894. It appeared in the Illustrated London News on September 1,1894. In it, a display showing the growth of the nitrate industry to 1890 can clearly be seen in the background, linking the typewriter to the "Nitrate King", 'Colonel' North. The subject of this display is no so obvious in pale reproductions of the later colourised version of this work (see below).
The
combination of Donne and Cooper brought together two men whose design and engineering backgrounds were
ideally suited to typewriter production. Donne and his father Lewis
patented watch winding mechanism in 1889-90, a devise which, like typewriters,
employed a mainspring and star wheels (English typewriter inventor Michael
Hearn was a witness.).
Cooper
had been in involved in cycle racing and bicycle and motor cycle design and
manufacture since 1880. Both Donne and Cooper later became deeply involved in
the motor industry, with Donne importing French cars such as the
Rochet-Schneider and Piccard Pictet and racing them in the early part of the
20th Century. After North’s executors sold the stock of North’s typewriters in
1901, Cooper took the remaining assembled machines to his home city of
Coventry, and continued to sell them there until 1903.
Next – Part III: Magic, Maligners and Malfunctions – the Waverley, Fitch, Maskelyne and Salter, and Many More.
